Canon LiDE 300 Colour Flatbed Scanner - Black

this time the scanner works well. just plugged in and it scanned with ease. great for a portable device at home for personal documents, inserting images into papers.if you want very high quality then you need to use an industrial scanner on full size copier at work or in a store.

I bought this exclusively for scanning in old photos and for £65, I am very happy with it.It took me about 2 hours to scan 250 photos. I scanned two at a time at 600 dpi and the quality is fine for me. The software for this scanner will automatically separate and crop the photos, so by scanning two at a time, as long as you leave a gap between them, the scanner will create two separate images on your computer and they will be perfectly cropped and aligned - so you don't need to keep them straight when putting them into the scanner. It takes about 30 seconds for the scanner to scan 2 photos at 600 dpi.Once you play around with it to make sure you know what you're doing and that you're happy with the quality, it doesn't take long to work through the photos and scan them all in.The software (which can be downloaded) is pretty straightforward and easy to use. If you are on macOS, you don't even need any drivers (not sure about Windows but they are all on the Canon website anyway).The only thing I will say is that this scanner has a lock switch on the bottom - I've no idea what this is for (maybe to stop your kids from scanning stuff?) but it is important to put it to the unlocked position or the scanner won't work. And if you unlock it whilst it's already plugged into the computer, you will need to disconnect and reconnect it to the computer (i.e. unplug / plug in the USB cable) after you put the switch to unlock, otherwise your computer might not detect it.This scanner also does not need any power source / plug socket, which is handy. It gets power from your computer (the USB cable is supplied).Overall I am very happy with this scanner - it did exactly what I wanted it to do and it was pretty cheap.

I'm a traditional artist. Bought as I needed a scanner and was on a budget. For a budget scanner it's great! Max size is A4 and scans up to 600 dpi which is good enough for what I needed it for. However I played around with scan settings and image formats, but whatever I did, the colours are very washed out in the scans. It's nothing a bit of saturation/hue adjustment can't fix, and my work uses a lot of bright colours so most people likely won't need to worry, and its fine for what I need. It picks up textures really well, however if you're using it to scan a lot of photographs/flat drawings etc consistently I'd bite the bullet and spend a little more. Very easy to use however does need a DVD drive to install.

Brilliant ,easy to use and good reproduction

The Canon LIDE 400 is my third of these type of scanner I have had over time starting with the Lide 110. Previous Lide models all worked reasonably well except from panel scanner buttons which stopped many years ago on MacOS, a software issue probably. My Lide 220 didn't survive the upgrade from from Ventura 13.6 to Sonoma 14.0 via should add though the same would have happened going to Windows 11and it's about 10 years in the market. I tried the usual things but it didn't really seem to budge so decided not to sweat the problem and just get a more up to date Canon. First, Amazon supplied wickedly fast arriving 7:43 AM less than 12 hours after ordering. The Lide 400 is the top of the range of Lide scanners, the 300 is about £20 cheaper but loses some document scanning options exchanging USB C for a micro B on the back of the cheaper model. I mf you are going portable I'd go for the 400 because those micro B are super delicate and only go in one way. I mainly use it for document scanning though quoted resolution and apparent facilities make it good for photography too I bet. For document scanning the Lide 400 claims about 8 seconds scanning time whereas my old Lide 210 10 seconds, the difference isn't readily apparent in practice so the cheaper Lide 300 would have done just as well for that document scanning. I am a Mac user so that is what I will concentrate on, there are loads of people out there who have reports with Windows.Box contents:- Scanner- USB A to C cable- Scanner stand- CD (see below)- DocumentationOnly thing to do is remove the tapes, other packaging and unlock the scanner head (bottom towards the front). Then hook up the cable and make Mac OS aware via Printers and scanners of the new unit detected via AirPrint although it's a scanner and no Wi-Fi involved. Effectively this means support is built into Mac OS itself so there is no driver from Canon.To save this being too long some bullet points:Good* Scanner is very nearly plug and play affair with Mac with respect to driver install. You just have to add the scanner from within the Settings app, it is an AirPrint device even thought it is not a printer.* IJ Scan utility is dark mode - hooray!* Very clear fast document scans at 300 DPI should be good for higher resolution photography work.* Scanner front panel buttons which actually do work, previous models buttons stopped working (some kind of software issue).Not so Good* The CD only contains a Windows installer, for Mac you will have reach Canon's driver pay to download any relevant companion software.* There seemed to be some teething issues with detection of the scanner, I managed to resolve by juggling connections of my 16 port USB hub to fix.* IJ Scan utility is very much more complicated than it was, not good for keyboard users. I accept though that this is a very niche thing. Most others want more buttons and functionality which it does provide.§* You cannot tweak the precise behaviour of the physical buttons on the scanner.